


One man looks at a dying bird

by disenchanted



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Internalized Homophobia, Language Barrier, M/M, Physical Disability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 12:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6854266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurie doesn't always understand what Charlot is saying. Neither does Charlot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One man looks at a dying bird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



i.

By their faces Charlot could tell something embarrassing was happening. The whole ward had turned round to look, even Willis was staring sourly from beneath his heavy brow. A nurse, one of the nicer ones, was standing as if trapped by Spud's bed, saying something that seemed chastising but not really carrying it through. Her fair face was warm-looking. At the center of it all Spud was lying with his head lolling back on the pillow, slurring enough that Charlot couldn't pick out any of the words. His face was like melting tallow, not at all red. Charlot hoped he hadn't done badly in the operation, then thought probably if Spud was dying the nurse would be more willing to listen to what he was saying. During his time in hospital Charlot had learnt to rely on signs beside the presence of a priest to tell when someone was in danger of going.

Charlot turned to the other side of his bed. To the beaky city boy in the bed next to him, he said, 'Que se passe-t-il? Que disent-ils?'

The city boy answered with laughing English which Charlot couldn't begin to sort out. The look on the boy's face, the pull to his lips and his wiggling brow, told Charlot it was saucy. 

A bit of banter had always seemed like a pleasant thing to Charlot; in Dunkirk, he had said things to girls just to see what he could get away with, then ran scared when it looked like he might actually have a chance at getting a leg over. It was just that Spud seemed like the withdrawn sort who'd scoff at the other boys, and here he was, reaching his hand out to the nurse and being laughed at. 

'Pardon? I'm sorry?' said Charlot, lifting as far as he could to look about the ward beyond the two beds on either side of him. 

It was stupid, he thought. Spuddy had had an operation, you couldn't expect him to be awake. But Charlot felt betrayed, his face was flushed with hurt, because he wanted to be the one Spud bothered. Why would he be, Charlot asked himself furiously, lying on his hospital bed half-dead and limp like a creature washed up by high tide. When you were mad with ether and all of that, you wanted comfort, you wanted women, mother or wife or nurse, you did not want a man who could not stand by your bed and lean down to embrace you, to kiss your forehead.

 

* * *

 

After Spud recovered from the anesthesia it was all a joke anyway. As breakfast came round the next morning the city boy leant in to Charlot and said, giving Spud a look over Charlot's shoulder, 'Now listen, quand il dit à la nurse que il veut un soir coucher et baiser et embrasser avec la femme, tu dit, "Oi! Spuddy's being naughty again!" et j'arrive à protéger la nurse, oui? Tu comprends?' 

With a grin towards Spud, for Spud, Charlot said, 'No, I think I say not. You will, comment dit-on, lui donner un coup de poing.' 

'Oh, I don't think he would do that,' explained Spud in French, 'he would be court-martialled for striking a non-commissioned officer.' This was spoken with a fox-like look that said another sort of joke was being made, one that was funny where the other ones were not. 

 

* * *

 

Before June Charlot had been just a body mostly, that had leant with the tilt of his father's smack, cutting its rough hands on rope and wire, raising its voice above the wind. His thoughts seemed to happen the way reflexes did, out of habit or instinct, getting him from one place to another wit hout a cock-up that would cost his family or get someone hurt. He knew the coming weather by the pressure in his ears, the moisture on his skin, and that was knowing enough. People in the cities, who worked indoors, he supposed they thought quite hard about what they were going to do. For him it had always been better to sift along with the rhythm of the seasons, sleeping when he was tired, waking before the sun. 

Now he thought—good God, he thought! He lived in a space about the size of a coffin, and he bit his lip through pain till it eased, and wondered what the French could have done to keep the Germans, the fucking Germans, out of France…what would happen if the Germans took Britain too, and what they would do with a hospital full of cripples. When he had morphia he wondered what would happen if the earth was closer to or farther from the sun, he wondered why it was that sound moved slower than light, and why aeroplanes could fly when the man in the bird suit had died jumping off the Eiffel Tower. 

Was this, he wanted to know, the way Spud had been for his whole life? Spud was one of those people who worked indoors; he read books that he couldn't lend to the other men on the ward because they were too boring, and when it was his turn to put a record on the gramophone he chose something or other with a piano or an orchestra that put everyone else, even the Sister, to sleep. When he wrote letters he paused every few words as if he had got a thousand words in his head that he would never put to paper. 

Probably Spud knew things that Charlot wouldn't even think to ask. It always seemed like he knew something— Something about himself, about souls, even if he didn't really know about living. Charlot wanted to know, too, without knowing exactly what he wanted to know. 

 

* * *

 

Like when the medical students came to look round the ward, and Spud looked straight at one of them as if, having seen him out of the corner of his eye, he simply knew him. Then the medical student, one of those bloodless blond Englishmen, got embarrassed just as the nurse had done. Charlot tried, in the best way he knew, to ask Spud what it was about: 'Do you know him?' he asked in French. 'Did he do something to piss you off?'

'It's nothing,' said Spud quietly, 'I was just telling Reg I thought I knew him, but I don't.'

'Who did you think he was, then?' asked Charlot, but the students were surrounding Spud's bed, peering down at his leg exposed on the cushion.

With feeling only in his upper half, Charlot always felt frustration like a swelling in his head, like his brain was a big boil that needed a pin heated over the stove. He tried to get it out by rubbing his head against the pillow, but his hair scratching on the starched linen only made his scalp itch. When the doctor turned to him and talked to him in stiff accented French, Charlot nearly wept with relief. How do you feel—oh all right sir—are you eating well—oh awfully well sir, beef and potatoes, mashed, and I'm ready for my next operation—ah tut-tut be patient, that will come soon enough.

 

* * *

 

But poor Spuddy, poor Laurie! The doctor had told him, he told Charlot, that he'd walk wrong for the rest of his life. To Charlot the news came like the cold slap of a wave. He had always assumed Spud would only be in hospital for a few months, then walk out on both legs as if the bullet had missed him. 

Somehow Charlot grieved for Spud more deeply than he'd done for himself. It made his chest seize up to think that a sweet girl might not marry Spud just because he'd got a short leg and couldn't take her out dancing. Charlot had never expected that sort of thing for himself—that is to say love, a life. He had only ever been another hand on deck, and now that the boat was gone, now that his father and his brothers were gone, now that the Germans were murdering their way through France, he could not go back even if his spine was new. But Spuddy! Bright as a clear dawn over open water. There was a man who ought to live. 

He would live, Charlot was sure, but maybe differently now, maybe in a way that meant he would have to bear more human cruelty than he deserved. Charlot thought of the soldiers of the last war he saw sometimes on the streets of Dunkirk, the aging bachelors with their medals pinned to dirty patched tunics, hobbling over cobblestones on crutches. 

 

* * *

 

One evening after dinner, while the radio was still going and the men on the ward were smoking their pipes, writing the letters that would go out in next morning's post, Charlot felt himself beginning to fall asleep. The song on the radio was one of those whose lyrics were simple enough for Charlot to understand: _Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run_ … 

The repetition was as soothing as a lullaby. Charlot closed his eyes to listen to the sleepy chatter of the ward, the English mumbling and the striking of matches, the shuffling of playing cards, the nurses' footsteps, the crinkling linen. 

Then he was on the smack again, crumpled on the deck as the boat bobbed with the current. Fog sifted over him, mist wetted his face but did not slake his thirst. The water beneath the boat churned with the energy of the crafts around it, the dozens of destroyers hulking like saints in the sea, the cruisers and gunboats, the merchant ships, the sloops and the smacks like his own. The tattering of machine guns sounded in the damp, close air. On the deck before him, his brother Paul, his youngest brother, was lying face-down, his limp hand flung back as if to stop the blood oozing from the red wet hole in his neck. The wound had stopped gushing, his skin was greying, but what blood had been lost was still on the deck, washed out by the seawater slopping over, soaking into the wood. It was so beyond what Charlot knew, he couldn't help but think it was a strange and awful dream. 

Ah, he thought, waking, this time it was a dream. An hour or two must have passed since he closed his eyes. The night was darker and quieter, and all the men who had been out on passes were trailing drunkenly back again, winking at each other. Anxiously Charlot lifted himself up as much as he was able and waited for Spud to come back. Every few minutes he asked Reg for the time. He had nearly given Spud up to the night when he slunk in, limping a little more than ordinary. 

'Thought you weren't going to come back,' said Charlot in French. He had meant it as a joke and found it came out pitiful. 'So what was that, you stay too late with a girl or something? Lose track of the time?' 

That was the wrong thing to say, too. All the blood went out of Spud's face, and Charlot began to worry he'd tried to get a girl and had been told to shove off. Or maybe he was shy enough he didn't like bragging. He wasn't changing into his pyjamas and slipping into bed, he was looking round the ward as if to find somebody. 

'Oh, right,' said Charlot, 'you want to go into the kitchen and say dirty things without the Sister hearing.'

'God no, I wouldn't go even for the cocoa. I'm going to go see Andrew. Don't wait up for me, I won't be back for a while. Goodnight, Charlot.' He turned to Reg then and said goodnight to him in English.

Was it that Andrew knew what Spud knew? The young orderly with the straw-coloured hair, the one who had refused to join up, the one half of the men on the ward loathed for not doing as they'd done—was it that he knew something? Some of the conscientious objectors flinched away from the gibes, but the ones Spud liked were always still, like martyrs. 

 

* * *

 

Charlot could say honestly he didn't wait up for Spud to come back to bed. It was just that he couldn't sleep, even after taking the pills that the nurse gave him to help him sleep. He only went from alert to murky, floating through thoughts that were just as likely to be awful as comforting.

And then Spud did come back. After the lights were out on the ward he crept to his bed, changed as sneakily as he could into his pyjamas, and crawled like a sleepy child beneath the sheet. By the Night Sister's lamplight Charlot could see Spud's face as he watched the ceiling, waiting for sleep to descend. Blood had filled his face again, he was flushed as if sunburnt or in love, but he was peaceful. He looked like he'd come to some sort of conclusion. 

 

* * *

 

Then Charlot was on the smack again. There wasn't the slow, stunned feeling of the dream this time, only a sudden submersion. He was in his bed on the ward waiting for Spud, who had gone into the city to get his leg massaged and never come back, and in a crack of strange thunder he was on the deck, trying to crawl down to the cabin aft. For a moment he was half in one world and half in the other, on his bed on the deck of the smack with his brothers and his father tumbling onto the floor around him. 

Someone was singing: _Run rabbit, run rabbit_. He heaved himself down from the bed only to feel as he fell the thump of the bullet in his back, then the crack of his skull on the deck. 

'Jesus Christ, Charlot,' cried someone in English, and Charlot wondered if it was the voice of God, and if so whether it was all right to take Christ's name in vain after all. Or perhaps it wasn't in vain?

He was on the smack, lying on the deck as it drifted, pulling himself towards his brother Paul, who was already still. … No, no, he was in the crew's berthing of a British destroyer, and someone was talking to him in English. Charlot tried to ask the Englishman where his brothers were and realised he was on the smack after all, running his parched tongue over his withered lips, squinting to keep his vision from blurring. … No, he was in the side-ward in the English hospital, and his stomach was lurching. 

Spud's friend was there, looking down on him from above. It seemed he was miles in the air, but enormous, each freckle and crease clear. He had one of the kindest faces Charlot had ever seen. So that was what Spud had wanted—to feel he was all right… Hadn't Charlot also looked at Spud with kindness? But then Charlot wasn't in a state of grace. He was wicked, wicked almost as the Germans, very very— 

'That's all right,' Spud's friend was saying in French, 'I'll help you.'

'Why 'm I here?' asked Charlot wildly. He had remembered about when Spud was shut up in the side-ward. 'Did I do— What'd I do wrong? Say something rude?' 

'Don't try to talk,' said the boy. 'I'm going out to fetch a towel, but I'll come back for you in a moment.'

'Look, if it's that, I'll say sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Swear I didn't mean it, don't even know what I said really, I'd never say anything against any of you. It's just sometimes I do things— Everyone does—'

Before the boy could tell Charlot what he had done to get put in the side-ward, the side-ward melted away and he was in the berthing of the destroyer with another Englishman leaning over him, shoving him to test if he was dead. In sheer terror of being tossed overboard he cried, 'I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive,' not thinking that maybe it would be better for him to be otherwise. … Yes, yes, he was alive, and he was in another bed. It was summer, the air was humid and thick with the salt of the sea, the linen was pushed down till it was hanging off the edge of the bed, draping on the floor. 

Charlot had always made fun of Hugo for thinking. He was a shop assistant, he arranged things on shelves and carried crates, he worked with his body just as Charlot did, in his own way. Still he spent his pocket money on books, and on slow days sat behind the counter with his legs propped up on an empty crate and read like he was studying for an exam. Charlot would say, 'What do you think you're going to do? Go to Paris and become a philosopher? Put it down, let's go get a drink.' But when the crucial moment came Charlot believed Hugo when he said it was all right, everything everyone said about sin and piety was lies made up to keep people from living.

'Hey, Charlot,' Spud was saying. Charlot hadn't known that Spud was there, but it made sense that he was. Probably if there was anyone on earth that could judge Charlot in anticipation of his being judged by God it would be Spud. To keep him from melting away with the rest of the room, Charlot clutched his wrist.

'I have committed,' said Charlot, 'a mortal sin—' 

'Shh,' said Spud, while on the other side of the bed Andrew stood smoothing a towel down onto the pillow, 'be quiet now, you're safe here, it's just that you're in hospital.'

The wrist was still in Charlot's hand, the wrist was still attached to the body, but it was a different body. Charlot was clinging to Hugo, pulling him back by the wrist and then seizing him fully, keeping him on the sweaty stained bed in the heat in the cramped attic room. Hugo was laughing: 'No, no—o, I've got to go to work….' Charlot was strong and could keep him close, against his chest, so their sweat mixed like the water in the Channel. He hadn't believed it was a mortal sin then, but then he didn't know anything about mortality. 

Charlot closed his eyes and opened them and saw the lamp on the ceiling of the side-ward, his body encased below him, Spud and Andrew to his left and right. Together they pulled the case from the pillow, they unbuttoned Charlot's shirt, they soothed Charlot's dry sour mouth with a wet cloth. The two of them seemed to Charlot like two halves of one body, the left hand and the right hand. When Spud reached out over the bed to pass Andrew the washcloth, their hands met, and stayed for a second together, so their sweat mixed too. It was like seeing both of a man's hands clasped together in supplication. 

Then their hands were needed for other things. Andrew turned away to fetch the new pillowcase, and Laurie put the washcloth in the bowl. Because it was not a sin to want to be held, Charlot flung his arms out and said, 'Come back, come back, hold my hand again.' 

 

* * *

 

ii.

All the while he and Andrew were talking in the kitchen Laurie felt as one does after having fired a rifle: his ears were ringing and he was dizzy. There was the sense that something needed doing, but of course there was nothing; and even if there were, it was doubtful Nurse would allow him to do it. He was aware of being envious, in a childish way, that Andrew at least had the tray of coffee and cream and things to get ready. 

Andrew, who ordinarily drew a certain resolve from the burden of mindless labour, seemed to have lost the capacity to function without being hampered physically by the presence of complex thought. As he spoke to Laurie he stared, uncomprehending, at the kettles and jugs and cups with which he was meant to be producing Nurse's nightly coffee. In the end he managed it, with the effect that there was no longer any tray with which he and Laurie could distract themselves. More than ever Laurie felt the importance of clarity and honesty, though he was not sure he believed that if one was clear and honest one was necessarily telling the truth.

Kissing Andrew he felt was an act of honesty. It was what he felt compelled to do then, with Andrew before the kitchen sink, studying an empty jug to keep from meeting his eyes. But he only felt compelled to do it because he had been told certain things about himself, about the world, about people for whom he cared, and he knew not all of that, or even half of it, was the truth. He remembered Charlot saying something about _péché mortel_ …. Charlot, he supposed, had been told things too; one could no more blame him for what he believed than one could blame Andrew. 

As he put his arms around Andrew, Laurie remembered how Charlot's hand had felt in his own. He realised he could not remember whether he had ever touched Charlot before. Likely there had been some touch on the shoulder, some brush of the forearms, but Laurie had lost the memory of it. He had, now, only Andrew's body in his arms, Andrew's mouth on his mouth, and in that the touch of the dead.

 

* * *

 


End file.
